Note: Javascript is disabled or is not supported by your browser. For this reason, some items on this page will be unavailable. For more information about this message, please visit this page: About CDC.gov.

Background: The relation between school spending and violence has yet to be explored. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the association between annual per student expenditure and physical assault against Minnesota educators. Methods: We utilized data from the Minnesota Educators' Study (MES) and Minnesota Department of Education school-level fiscal and demographic data. The MES examined a randomly selected cohort of state-licensed kindergarten-grade 12 employed educators. From mailed questionnaires, response rates for both Phase I (comprehensive data collection on violent events) and Phase II (case-control) were 84%. Cases experienced a work-related physical assault event in the previous 12 months; controls reported no assaults. Exposure data were collected for cases (month prior to event) and non-assaulted controls (randomly selected months). Analyses were conducted on 213 cases and 606 controls. Results: Using directed acyclic graphs to guide selection of confounders, multivariate analyses suggested an unexpected increased risk of physical assault with increasing levels of annual per student expenditures (reference less than $7900): $7900-8700 (OR)=1.4, 95% CI: 0.8, 2.4); $8700-9900 (OR=1.7, 95% CI: 1.0, 2.9); greater than $9900 (OR=1.9, 95% CI: 1.0, 3.6). Additional analyses will further explore the potential for unmeasured confounders as well as the relation between the allocation of per student expenditure to various school program areas (e.g., pupil support services, athletic programming, etc.) and risk of assault. Conclusion: Results of analyses could potentially serve to guide school policies for directing funds to key programs areas that may serve to reduce violent events in schools.